Hypocritical Measures
July 28, 2008
‘International law is one long legacy of double dealing,’ writes Ramzy Baroud.
The crimes committed against innocent people in Darfur represent a shameful episode in the history of Sudan and its neighbours, including Chad, which has played a dubious role in sustaining the seething conflict. Equally disgraceful is the politicising of the bloody conflict in ways that will ensure its continuation.The decision of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor-general, Luis Moreno- Ocampo, to file an arrest warrant for Sudan’s current President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, and the international responses to his decision, demonstrate both the politicising of the crisis and the selectiveness of international law.
Consider this bizarre twist. The US Congress passed a resolution, on 22 June 2004, declaring that the violence in Darfur was state-sponsored genocide. The resolution — named the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act — was signed into law by President Bush in October 2006.
Between the vote and Bush’s signature the United Nations conducted a sweeping investigation — unlike Congress’s rash decision which was based almost entirely on lobby and interest group pressure — declaring, in early 2005, that both the government and militias were systematically abusing civilians in Sudan’s western province. It insisted, however, that no genocide had taken place.
War Crimes Paradox
July 18, 2008
Ah, the irony! The ICC for the first time moves to indict a sitting head of state for war crimes and it isn’t George Bush, Ehud Olmert or Tony Blair, but the president of Sudan! As is their wont, ‘Little Crimes Get Punished, Big Ones Don’t‘, writes Paul Craig Roberts in this excellent piece. (thanks Ali)
National Public Radio has been spending much news time on Darfur in Western Sudan where a great deal of human suffering and death are occurring. The military conflict has been brought on in part by climate change, according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Drought is forcing nomads in search of water into areas occupied by other claimants. No doubt the conflict is tribal and racial as well. The entire catastrophe is overseen by a government with few resources other than bullets.
Now an International Criminal Court prosecutor wants to bring charges against Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
I have no sympathy for people who make others suffer. Nevertheless, I wonder at the International Criminal Court’s pick from the assortment of war criminals? Why al-Bashir?
Is it because Sudan is a powerless state, and the International Criminal Court hasn’t the courage to name George W. Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals?
Why Darfur Intervention is a Mistake
May 24, 2008
Alex de Waal analyzes the politics and practicality of intervention on BBC’s Viewpoints.
Analysts say that Darfur is Rwanda in slow motion, that we should send troops to protect African civilians from their Arab killers and disarm the infamous Janjaweed.
Khartoum came under attack by rebels just two weeks ago
In the Rwandan genocide, a million people were slaughtered in a hundred days. It was Africa’s holocaust. Few would have opposed a short sharp episode of colonial-style armed intervention to stop it.
The British Foreign Secretary, David Milliband, certainly leans towards such a policy for Darfur.
“Too many times, in the aftermath of mass atrocities, we’ve promised ‘never again’,” he said.
“But in a world where so many states remain wedded to the principle of non-interference and the primacy of sovereignty, how do we make the responsibility to protect a reality, not a slogan?”
His are good intentions but they pave the way to a problem from hell.
Save Darfur
April 14, 2008
How Can We Let Darfur Know How Much We’re Doing For Them?
Panelists discuss the tragic lack of media access in Darfur and how we can help Darfurians realize how much we’re helping them.
Why Blame China?
February 14, 2008
So China is indirectly responsible for human rights abuses in Darfur by virtue of its business links with Sudan, and Steven Spielberg pulls support for the Beijing Olympics. Israel on the other hand is directly responsible for the creeping genocide of Palestinians, and what does he do? Make propaganda films to deflect attention from its crimes.
‘It’s gratifying to have a new focus on Darfur but China’s role in halting the country’s conflict is no bigger than anyone else’s’, writes Jonathan Steele
The excitement over Steven Spielberg’s withdrawal of support for the Beijing Olympics has helped to re-focus attention on Darfur. That is all to the good, especially if it leads his fellow-protesters to look more clearly at what is actually happening there and what moral responsibility China really has in allegedly failing to stop the war in Darfur. Brian Brivati wrote on this blog yesterday that “China is the key“, but is that really the case?
Wars always have at least two sides, and in the Darfur case that is an underestimate. There are around a dozen different rebel groups currently fighting the government. To put the blame on only one party makes no moral or political sense. The best way to stop the fighting and the humanitarian emergency that flows from it is to have an organised ceasefire and hold talks. This is what the Sudanese government did last October on the eve of the peace conference that the UN and the African Union held in Libya. Only a minority of the rebel groups reciprocated the ceasefire offer or attended the conference. They preferred to go on fighting, in part because they feel the one-sided approach of much of the outside world, with its exclusive pressure on the Khartoum government, helps their cause.
The point is slowly being accepted by many of the so-called Darfur support groups. Compared with three years ago, when the campaign started, their statements now show a greater willingness to recognise the rebels’ negative role in attacking aid workers, stealing humanitarian supplies, and raiding government-held villages and towns. The latest atrocity in early February when Khartoum-backed militias burnt down two towns in Western Darfur was provoked by attacks by the Justice and Equality Movement, one of the main groups which rejects peace talks. The pattern is depressingly familiar from almost every counterinsurgency campaign in history - rebel raids, which produce a government over-reaction. But who is to blame? If the rebels went to the peace table, there would have been no impulse for the government to respond with force.
The support groups still seem not to appreciate that the humanitarian situation has changed. Claims of genocide were never accepted by the UN, but the events that gave rise to them occurred in 2003 and 2004. Today’s Darfur is still appalling but not so bloody a place. In any case, the death rates of those years are heavily disputed, as is their cause. The victims of hunger and disease exacerbated by forced displacement are one-sidedly, and often deliberately, described by lobby groups as having been killed by government forces or their militias, as though they were executed.
Subsequent years have seen a huge deployment to Darfur of UN and other international aid agencies. They eliminated starvation and massively reduced death from disease. Displacement in overcrowded camps is no longterm solution and people need confidence and security to go home. But the need to bring in a more powerful UN peacekeeping force to help to ensure that should not obscure the fact that the humanitarian effort has already been one of the UN’s most successful interventions anywhere.
Getting governments to fulfil their promises of troops for the new hybrid UN/AU force in Darfur, trying to obtain more helicopters, and building the peacekeepers’ bases more quickly are important tasks. But, however well-equipped its force is, the UN cannot impose peace. That can only be done through a ceasefire and political talks. As Ban Ki-moon rightly said last week, “the deployment of Unamid will only be as effective as the political process it is mandated to support“.
How does China relate to this? It helped to pass the UN resolution to set up Unamid. It has contributed several hundred military engineers to Unamid. What more can it realistically do? The idea that it can pressure Khartoum “to stop the killing”, as Brivati wrote yesterday, is too simple. The killing is more likely to stop when the rebels come to the peace table that the AU and the UN (with China’s help) have laid out for them.
Humanitarians Do Darfur
December 1, 2007
Black Agenda Report has an excellent piece on the exploitation of the conflict in Darfur for political reasons entitled ‘Ten Reasons Why “Save Darfur” is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa‘, except he studiously avoids mentioning the Israel connection. As the article correctly points out, these philanthropists have actively preempted resolution of the conflict in order to have a cause that they could champion and deflect attention from Israeli crimes. However, as the following article by Gbemisola Olujobi (How Not to Help Africans) shows, the members of the Humanitarian Intervention Industry don’t have any compunctions inflicting abuses of their own, so long as it advances their agenda. (p.s. Also check out this poignant plea from an African writer for the West to ‘Stop trying to “save” Africa‘)
The French charity group L’Arche de Zoé (Zoë’s Ark) took 103 Chadian children from their homes with promises of sweets and a trip to the city of Abeche. But the group put the children on a plane that was bound for France, passing them off as “Sudanese orphans from Darfur” who needed urgent medical care and foster homes in France. The fiasco sheds new light on the activities of Western “angels of mercy” in Africa.
What was Zoë’s Ark up to in Chad? On Oct. 25, a plane carrying 103 children was stopped in the Chadian city of Abeche moments before it was to take off to France. The children were swathed in bloody bandages and IV drips. Officials of Zoë’s Ark, the charity group that arranged the airlift, said the children were sick and destitute orphans from Sudan’s conflict-ridden region of Darfur who needed urgent medical attention. They said the children would be placed temporarily with French families after receiving medical treatment.
But something seemed out of place, and Chadian security insisted on checking out these children. They found that their wounds and illnesses were fake. The bandages had been smeared with dark liquid to make them look bloody, and the IV drips were unconnected. On top of it, the children said they were not from Darfur but were in fact Chadians and that no one had told them they were going to France. They had been picked up from their villages by “humanitarians” who gave them sweets and promised them an educational trip to Abeche.
Do-Gooders Gone Bad
November 12, 2007
In using Darfur as a diversion from Israel’s crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Israel Lobby has contributed to a perpetuation of misery in both places. Here even Newsweek has finally noticed the damage being done by the Save Darfur Coalition. “Activists have brought issues like Darfur into living rooms. But they may be doing more harm than good”, it reports.
The children’s bandages were just for show. Workers from the little-known French charity Zoe’s Ark had wrapped gauze around the heads and bodies of their young charges to speed them through checkpoints. But the plan went disastrously wrong. Before dawn on Oct. 25, Chadian soldiers intercepted 103 youngsters—described as orphans from Darfur—before the children could board a chartered flight for France. Six activists from Zoe’s Ark, along with three journalists and seven flight crew, were arrested and charged with kidnapping. Aid workers on the ground questioned whether the kids really had lost their parents—or indeed whether they were even from Sudan. Chad’s President Idriss Déby called the operation “pure and simple abduction.” Zoe’s Ark insisted its intentions were good. “It’s unimaginable that doubts are being cast on these people of good faith,” a spokesman said last week.
War in the Name of Peace
October 5, 2007
The world’s best news service Inter Press Service interviews Jean Bricmont, the author of Humanitarian Imperialism.
BRUSSELS, Sep 20 (IPS) - International law is seen by many to have been shunted aside by Western powers when launching their most significant military operations in the past decade.
In 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation lacked any mandate from the United Nations when it attacked Serbia. In Afghanistan, the U.S. continued bombing in 2002, even when the government that replaced the Taliban asked it to stop (lest the civilian death toll rise).
And the United States asserted a highly disputed entitlement to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq a year later, citing bogus claims that the country had weapons of mass destruction and had played a role in the Sep 11, 2001 attacks.
In his new book ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’, the pacifist intellectual Jean Bricmont exposes how human rights have been used to justify military exploits that he regards as legally dubious and morally odious.
A 55-year-old professor of theoretical physics in Belgium’s University of Louvain, Bricmont is also editor of ‘Chomsky’, a new collection of articles on the linguist and trenchant political analyst Noam Chomsky.
Bricmont spoke to IPS Brussels correspondent David Cronin.
IPS: You have suggested that NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 was a turning point for a new form of imperialism. Why do you think so?
JB: There were several reasons against that war but there was so little reaction from people on the left. If you exclude a very small number of individuals who knew better, everyone was convinced the war was necessary and the U.S. should intervene for humanitarian reasons, irrespective of the particularities of the case.
I don’t agree that it was a good thing to destroy international law. I don’t agree that the situation in Kosovo was so dire, that it was necessary to bomb (Serbia). And I don’t agree that the removal of (then Serbian president Slobodan) Milosevic was a good thing, irrespective of everything else.
Milosevic was elected. Maybe his election was not pure. But there is no pure democracy in the world. In France, you needed six times as many votes to elect a communist in urban areas as you do to elect a (right-leaning) Gaullist in rural areas. But nobody says France is not a democracy.
IPS: Much of ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’ deals with Iraq. Why do you reject the widely held view that the oil industry should be blamed for the war there?
JB: Of course, oil had a role to play in a trivial sense. The U.S. doesn’t want Iraq’s oil under the feet of Iran, Saudi Arabia or even the present Iraqi government.
But the naïve view of the peace movement that the U.S. went there to rob oil doesn’t seem defensible. I don’t know of any evidence that the oil industry lobbied for war.
Every war needs war propaganda. And the oil industry — to my knowledge — have not done any war propaganda at all.
The Zionist lobby, on the other hand, have always done war propaganda. If you open an American newspaper, you will find columns that are written by people who are Zionist and pro-Israel, even if they are not all Jews. It is fair to call (President George W.) Bush and (Vice-President Dick) Cheney Zionists, even if they are not Jewish. Especially Cheney.
IPS: The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was preceded by huge protests across Europe. Why has the peace movement lost that momentum?JB: I’m not a sociologist but if I can resort to conjecture: many people went out in the streets because they thought the war would turn ugly. Of course, it did turn ugly but not in the way that was thought. There were no weapons of mass destruction. And don’t forget that (then British prime minister) Tony Blair was talking about missiles being launched within 45 minutes.
The people in the peace movement were either genuinely anti-war or genuinely concerned about the interests of their own countries.
There are different situations in different countries. In Britain the anti-war movement faced a problem of deciding who to vote for. The Conservatives are as gung-ho as Labour. And with the Liberal Democrats, the system is biased against them.
IPS: Given your criticism of Israel’s tactics in the Palestinian territories, do you think there is a case for boycotting Israeli goods?
JB: Yes, there should be a campaign for a boycott. That is one way that citizens have to show they are angry.
Some people say: why not boycott the U.S.? I think we should boycott the U.S. but I don’t see how this could be done practically.
In Britain and the U.S., a large part of the population does not agree with the government. In Israel, there is much more homogeneity. Even the moderates in the genuine peace camp are very marginal.
IPS: Reviewers have pointed out that your book doesn’t examine the situation in Darfur. What should the West do about the killings there?JB: My book is not against intervention within the framework of the UN. In principle, maybe something could be negotiated there. A peacekeeping force can be sent when there is a peacekeeping agreement to prevent rogue elements from destroying the peace. But when you send a peacekeeping force before you have a peacekeeping agreement, that is war.
It also seems to me that some people are using Darfur to change the subject away from Iraq. Iraq may be the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. You have three-four million refugees and maybe one million dead.
IPS: You are quite critical of human rights organisations for being selective in deciding what rights they focus on. Why is that?JB: Human Rights Watch says it will not discuss whether a war is legitimate or not. All it wants is for war parties to respect the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention is not respected in any war.
IPS: You’ve also written that the left in Europe is only moderately less in favour of unfettered capitalism than the right. Can you explain what you mean by that?
JB: It is amazing how after the fall of communism, democracy became the new cause. The left adopted this and turned it into a pro-Western, anti-Third World discussion.
Look at the way the left complains about China. When the Chinese said recently that they want to improve the rights of workers in Chinese factories, big Western corporations said: ‘If you do that, we will move abroad, we will move to Vietnam.’ This is not something the left is concerned about. It just blames the Chinese leaders for everything.
IPS: Can I ask you about the European Union and the current efforts by its leaders to introduce a reform treaty that is largely the same as the constitution rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005. I understand you were pleased by the ‘No’ vote in France?JB: I wasn’t entirely happy. I was happy that at least the media was defeated.
But I have no illusion about why people voted ‘No’. They voted because of nationalism. Fifty-five percent of people voted ‘No’ and of that 35 percent were from the left and 20 percent were from the right.
There is nothing telling me that that the reason why people on the left voted ‘No’ was all for social reasons and not for reasons of nationalism. With the victory of (centre-right candidate Nicolas) Sarkozy (in a presidential election earlier this year), a lot of people who voted for him had voted ‘No’. People over 65 who voted overwhelmingly for Sarkozy had voted ‘No’.
The failure I see in Belgium at the moment (where Dutch and French-speaking parties have not yet formed a coalition government several months after a general election) could anticipate the future of Europe. Why should the Finns, Portuguese, Irish and Greeks be feeling closer to each other, more than Flemish and Walloons feeling closer to each other?Without a common feeling, how do you build a country with bureaucracy and free markets? There is an enormous amount of delusion (about European integration).
IPS: Finally, I’ve been told that you are the man who effectively introduced Noam Chomsky to francophone Europe. Is that true?
JB: I first met Chomsky when I went to listen to him in Princeton (the U.S. university) in the early 1980s. After the first Gulf War, I invited him to Belgium to speak at the Flemish university VUB.
In France it has been an uphill battle to put him on the map. (Journalist) Philippe Val attacked him recently because (Osama) bin Laden mentioned him in his recent video.
He is still being demonised and misrepresented.
Pin Drops in Darfur
October 4, 2007
A contingent of African Union peace keepers was attacked by Darfurian rebels las week killing several Nigerian soldiers. The response from the genocide industry (Save Darfur and the myriad other Zionist outfits) has been conspicuous in its absence. The various Israel Lobby groups which have been using Darfur as a diversion, to deflect criticism off Israel, have also been silent as Israel has been imprisoning refugees who took Israeli pronouncements at face value and sought refuge there. Now a group of elder statesmen from around the world are in the region, and their testimony seems to contrast significantly with the shrill cries of Israel Lobby propagandists in US and International media. BBC reports:
One of a group of veteran statesmen visiting Sudan, Lakhdar Brahimi, has accused the West of pandering to unrepresentative Darfur rebel groups.
The former UN envoy spoke as Nigeria’s army chief was in Sudan to repatriate the bodies of Nigerian soldiers killed when Darfuri rebels overran their post.
The group of elders have urged the international community to speed up the deployment of 26,000 peacekeepers.
But they say the violence does not meet the legal definition of genocide.
At a news conference to mark the end of their two-day visit, the group said Darfur was deeply divided, with violence and widespread rape ignored by the Sudanese authorities.
No genocide
“There is a legal definition of genocide and Darfur does not meet that legal standard. The atrocities were horrible but I do not think it qualifies to be called genocide,” said former US President Jimmy Carter.
They also urged Khartoum to hand over war crimes suspects for trial at the International Criminal Court, notably Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs, Ahmad Harun, and the Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kushayb.
THE ELDERS
South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Former US President Jimmy Carter
Children’s rights advocate Graca Machel
Veteran UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi
Mr Brahimi said peace talks planned later this month had raised a glimmer of hope.
But he said the situation for people in Darfur was dire and they too needed to be represented at the talks.
“The international community has acted rather irresponsibly on all this in the past by pampering a lot of these people around - not really wondering whether they really represented anybody and whether they were acting responsibly,” said Mr Brahimi.
The group has now concluded a visit that took them from Khartoum to Juba in southern Sudan to discuss the shaky peace in force there, and then to El Fasher in Darfur from where they were able to visit some of the province’s estimated 2m displaced people.
Peacekeepers essential
“It is quite clear to us that the crucial element to end the suffering of the people of Darfur is for the hybrid force to be deployed as soon as possible,” Archbishop Tutu told reporters.
The African Union (AU) has some 7,000 troops deployed in Darfur as monitors, and their commander has admitted they are outmanned and outgunned by rebels who have splintered into many different groups.
A 26,000-strong hybrid force made up of both AU and United Nations forces called Unamid is meant to be in place by 2008 under the overall command of Nigerian General Martin Luther Agwai.
Ethiopia has just pledged 5,000 soldiers to Unamid.
The bulk of the forces currently in Darfur are from Nigeria and as the Elders were addressing their news conference, the bodies of the seven Nigerian soldiers killed when their outpost was overrun by rebels on Saturday, were being flown home.
The Nigerian Defence Ministry said the seven will be given a national burial in Abuja on Friday, to be attended by President Umaru Yar’Adua.
The bodies of the other three victims, from Botswana, Mali and Senegal will also be flown home for burial.
When Zionists Go Humanitarian
August 22, 2007
Lessons from the first Zionist encounter with humanitarianism: People from Darfur are good enough to be political props, but not good enough to be allowed refuge in your country. Whe the US Israel Lobby established the Save Darfur campaign, it clearly hadn’t taken into account the possibility that it may be saddling with humanitarian responsiblity a country whose human rights abuses it was set up to deflect attention from. This Reuters report is touching.
ISRAEL has begun deporting refugees from the massacres in the Sudanese region of Darfur despite claims that the legacy of the Holocaust imposes a special responsibility on the Jewish state to protect fugitives from genocide.
On Saturday, for the first time Israel deported African refugees who had sneaked across its border with Egypt. The Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported most of the 50 refugees returned to Egypt were believed to be from Darfur, where militias allegedly supported by the Sudanese Government have killed an estimated 200,000 people.
The office of the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, said the forced return of the 50 refugees complied with Israeli and international law.
This month 63 of Israel’s 120 parliamentarians, including the opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, signed a petition asking the Government to allow Sudanese refugees to remain in Israel until another country could be found to take them.
“The refugees need protection and sanctuary, and the Jewish people’s history as well as the values of democracy and humanity pose a moral imperative for us to give them that shelter,” the petition said.
In recent months the number of African migrants trying to sneak across Israel’s border with Egypt has reached 50 a day, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says.
Although most of them say they are fleeing persecution, the Israeli Government argues that they are economic migrants who have chosen to leave the safety of Egypt in search of better conditions in Israel.
At the weekend an Israeli Government spokesman said that some of the approximately 500 Darfuri refugees already in Israel would be allowed to stay but new arrivals would be sent back.
Israel estimates that around 2800 mainly African migrants and refugees have illegally crossed its border in recent years - far fewer than the numbers of would-be migrants coming to European Union states but high for a country where non-Jewish immigration is frowned on.
Over the past two decades Israel has accepted about 100,000 immigrants from Ethiopia and a million from the former Soviet states. They have been encouraged to come under Israel’s Law of Return, which grants citizenship and benefits to anyone who can show they had at least one Jewish grandparent.
The Israeli Government argues that it is entitled to return the fugitives to their country of first refuge and that it has been assured by the Egyptian Government that they will not be harmed or returned to Sudan.
Human rights groups say there are already about 2 million Sudanese refugees in Egypt, where they complain of discrimination and state brutality.
This month an Israeli television channel said that it had footage shot by Israeli border guards of two Sudanese refugees being beaten to death by Egyptian border guards. It said it would not show the footage to avoid a dispute with Egypt.
